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In a white paper on how to write your way to the top of the search engines, I state that linkbaiting is just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Those of you who know me aren’t surprised by statements like this, but really, its the truth. Furthermore, linkbaiting isn’t just good times, it can also help you grow your business. Let me explain.

What is linkbaiting? It’s about creating content that will get the attention of news sites, bloggers, and site owners. The name of the game is to get them to link to you. Get enough incoming links, and you start to positively effect where you stand in the search engine results. A good linkbaiting program can work hand-in-hand with a PR effort to get your name out there, and it’s way more fun (and effective) then some dreadful SEO program.

Way back in the day, when I was making a living as a freelance journalist, the emphasis was on leads and angles. Both of these tools give you quite a bit of leverage when constructing linkbait. A lead is a term for the main idea you’re going to “lead” with. For example, several months ago there was a story out there that Al Gore’s son had been pulled over by police. Apparently, he had been going 100 MPH in his Toyota Prius. I remarked to my environmentalist friends that CNN had really buried the lead–they should have gone with the speedy Prius thing.

An angle is an approach to a story. Give me a story, and I should be able to give you a dozen angles (or more) on how to approach it. For example, if I were writing a story about homelessness, I could come at it from some kind of top-down high-level economic number-crunching angle. Or I could zoom in and write the story from the perspective of someone who is homeless. Or I could tell the story featuring those who work in shelters and soup kitchens. Or I could tackle the issue of family members trying to find their loved ones who have “dropped out of sight.”

Same story, different angles and leads.

Tied in with all of this is the headline. Without a good headline, stories die. In journalism, this means that someone skips over your story to read something else. In the world of competitive linkbaiting, it means that you don’t get the links. Headlines are a pretty big topic, and no, we don’t have time to go into them here. Check out CopyBlogger’s headline formulas as a starter.

With linkbaiting, what you want is the link. To get the link, you first have to be noticed. That’s where you lead comes in. However, to maintain interest and actually get the other guy to link to you, you need to give them something worth linking to. Generally speaking, a blogger will link to something that he/she thinks will benefit their audience in some way–your post imparts great information, reinforces their opinions or views, is contrarian in some way, or is just plain funny or entertaining. More and more, we’re also seeing lots of links to “attack pieces.”

Let me expound on each:
Give me News! But don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Give me something new. Find a new area that hasn’t been exploited and give me breaking information. Very hard to pull off, in my opinion.

Attack! Attack! Has somebody said or published something you don’t agree with? Then go on the offensive and challenge their ideas. Warning: don’t stray into ad hominem attacks. That’s just tacky. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should too!

Be a contrarian. If there’s some kind of popular opinion, sacred cow, or current practice that you think is silly, outdated, or what have you, then say so. I’ve been a long-time opponent of SEO. I think it’s a shady practice, and I don’t make any bones about it. I also find most of the advertising world’s tactics to be worthy of a few contrarian shots too. If you like being a pain in the butt, then this is your niche. Just remember, it’s fun to make enemies!

Entertain me while teaching me. If you’ve got something funny or entertaining to say, then say it. One of my most popular blog posts was titled “Everything I learned about marketing I learned in the 80s“. It provides a list of marketing rules/axioms that all relate back to 80s pop culture.

For all of you who look at this and say, “Gee this is hard” I say to you, “Duh.” Content has always been hard, content will always be hard. And yes, I understand that some of you are working in the waste water industry, or the port management industry, or the pet carrier manufacturing industry. I know that you’re probably looking at what you do and are saying (out loud, right now), “There’s no way I can come up with a good piece of linkbait to attract incoming links.”

To you I say, HA! And HA again. Anything can be linkbaited. How about: 101 Ways a Pet Carrier Can Keep your Dog Safe While Traveling? Or, 50 Ways a Comprehensive Waste Water Plan Can Save Your Company Money? Or 153 Easy Ways to Secure your Port Operations?

One final note about linkbait. It takes time to develop a good piece. Prepare to do your research. If you think you’re going to roll out the door with 10 rules for blah, be prepared to write 25. Also be prepared to edit, edit, edit. Forgo long paragraphs for bullet/numbered lists. Pass your linkbait around to see if it gets a reaction from people. Better to know if its lame before you publish it.

Okay, I lied. One more thing. Content may be king, but the title is the crown. Without a good title, you’re not going to get very far. Not only does it attract attention, but it gives your writing focus. Please compare “Strategies for getting links” (blah) with “Linkbaiting for Fun and Profit” (quasi-humorous, tongue-in-cheek, not very descriptive).

That’s it for now. Now check out our linkbaiting service.

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Didn’t you just hate those people in school, who, when given a paper assignment, knew exactly what to do and created sparkling prose well ahead of the deadline? Leaving you and everyone else you knew to fight and struggle to the bitter end, pulling all-nighters until it was all done?

Sorry to say, I’ve always been one of those guys who looked forward to any writing assignment, and never had a problem with them. Writing and all the associated tasks (like audience analysis and research) always came naturally to me.

Even today, I’m still working at a blistering pace. I’ve been known to write a 25-page chapter for a book in one day. Granted, some of those pages contained screen shots or code samples, but you’re still talking about 2500 or 3000 words–well above the magic “1000 word level” that most professional writers aspire to.

The reason I’m able to write like this is because I follow four easy steps every time I start a project. These steps are easy to learn and can be resized to fit any writing effort at hand–from a simple memo all the way up to a book.

Here are the steps:

1. Figure out who you’re writing for.
2. Immerse yourself in the subject matter and the objective.
3. Let it all out in one burst.
4. Walk away, then revise with hot buttons in mind.

The first step is the most obvious step for any professional writer, but it’s something that non-writers never ever think about. You MUST know who the audience is, because that one piece of information will make or break you. For example, does your audience consist of newbies or veterans? Do they hate your product? Know anything about your product? Have they just been injured in some way by your company? Does the audience consist of your super-boosters? Total strangers?

Once you know who the audience is in a general way, try to find out as much as you can about them specifically. Sometimes you can find out very specific things if you’re writing to a small group of people (like the board of directors of a corporation). If you can’t zero in that much, you can still learn a great deal by doing basic demographic and psychographic research. You want to get inside the head of the reader.

The second step also comes naturally to professional writers. Once you know who you’re writing for, immerse yourself in the subject matter. Figure out what the objective is and stick to it. Pull out all the stops when you do your research: read web sites, brochures, technical manuals, articles, whatever. Read the stuff put out by the competition. Read the scientific journals. Dig through all the newspaper stories and blog entries. Take lots of notes, and let it percolate in your brain. If you’re like me, create a mind map that shows the relationships between the parts.

The percolation is the key, and it leads to step 3. I do all my writing in my head. By the time I sit down in front of the word processor, my fingers are just taking orders from my brain. Some writers do their writing the old fashioned way, composing as they go, but I’ve found that this leads to madness. The writing becomes a performance, one that you’ve rehearsed in your head. If you’re composing right at the keyboard, forget about it, you’ll have too much of your critical brain turned on. Instead, you want to have all that stuff sorted out before you set words to paper or word processor.

Step 4 is also critical. Once you’ve bolted it all out, walk away for a while. Go catch some lunch, or pack up for the day. Let it rest. Then come back and revise it without mercy. How do you know if you’re on the right track? Easy–just go back to what you learned about the audience. Remember, the first step in all this is to learn about them–their likes/dislikes/vices/wants/needs/hot buttons. You want to read what you’ve written through that prism.

Always go through this final step with WIIFM in mind–What’s In It For Me! Take out anything that doesn’t bolster the case you’re making. Rip out the confusing parts. Excise the blithering blather. Make sure that every sentence supports your objective and speaks to the audience.

What you should be left with is something worth sending out.

It’s really easy to scale these four steps to just about any project. For example, let’s say you’ve been tasked with sending out a promotional email. Don’t panic! Simply go through the four steps.

Audience first. You find out that the audience consists of customers who have already purchased a product from your company. The objective is to get them to buy a new product. Unfortunately the email has to go out within 24 hours, so you only have a little bit of time to immerse yourself in the audience and the new product. So you interview the product manager to learn more about the product, and learn there’s a wiki for the product that the engineers put together. You spend a bit of time there, gathering up information and more questions to ask.

You then call the sales team and the support guys to learn as much as you can about your customers–what has their experience been like in the past? What objections have they thrown in the way of sales? What kinds of things do they want to see (testimonials, case studies, resources) to help convince them they should buy?

By the time you get back to your desk, your head is bursting with ideas, and you already know how to frame a basic five paragraph email. You know how to start it (the new product is better than product X because of Y and Z) and you know how it will end (with a link to a web landing page where they can download a free trial). You bolt it out and then take an hour-long break.

When you come back to the email, you revise by taking what you know about your audience and reading the piece through their eyes. You figure out that you’ve spent too much time with marketing puffery and not enough on data that will make them want to buy. So you rework the piece. By the time you’re ready to go with the email, you have something that is infinitely better than anything you could have done with another process.

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If you’re anything like me, you manage team members (employees, contractors, freelancers) and customers. Given enough people you interact with, you start having to process a lot of voice and email communication–and a lot of that stuff contains either status updates or action items. Unfortunately, a vast amount of that stuff is long and convoluted, each beginning with an explanation about what happened and finally meandering to a closing that summarizes the problem and maybe offering some kind of solution or way out of the problem.

Often times, you have to read the whole message in order to figure out if there’s a problem or an action item in there somewhere. It can get pretty frustrating, particularly if you’re in the heat of the moment and receiving 20-30 such emails every few hours. Such is life in the fast lane, right?

Not necessarily!

As my good friend Ian Stahl once said to me in the middle of the DotCom madness, “Stop coming to me with problems….bring me a problem and a solution.”

Here’s a nice little template for making status communications run smoother:

1. Punch line: The facts; no adjectives, adverbs or modifiers. “Milestone 4 wasn’t hit on time, and we didn’t start Task 8 as planned.” Or, “Received charter approval as planned.”
2. Current status: How the punch-line statement affects the project. “Because of the missed milestone, the critical path has been delayed five days.”
3. Next steps: The solution, if any. “I will be able to make up three days during the next two weeks but will still be behind by two days.”
4. Explanation: The reason behind the punch line. “Two of the five days’ delay is due to late discovery of a hardware interface problem, and the remaining three days’ delay is due to being called to help the customer support staff for a production problem.”

Notice that this template is in reverse order of how we normally get status information, but it is a heck of a lot more efficient for everyone involved because of the reversal.

You can read the whole story (and the story behind this blog post’s headline) at computerworld.com.

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I gave a talk at TechBA (a program that’s part of the University of Texas–basically they nurture and grow tech companies from Mexico) a few weeks ago. Each slide in my Keynote presentation consisted of 1-2 words. I had two slides in there that featured diagrams that I built up with transitional effects, but that was it for complexity.

Each word was in like 96 point font on a plain black background. The topic of the talk was “Marketing 2.0″ and the focus was on the fact that Marketing 2.0 is really about getting back to the basics of Marketing, where marketing was before Advertising (and Advertising Agencies) turned marketing into an exercise in shouting at the top of your lungs over and over and over again until somebody purchased your stuff.

In any case, after reading Presentation Zen and Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 Powerpoint rule I’m happy to say that I’m finally on the cutting edge of something or other.

Listen, all of you who think that each slide should contain 6-7 bullet points (and each bullet point should feature 6-7 words)…there’s this thing called “cognitive overload.” If you present us with a ton of words on the screen and start talking about those words, we will only be able to focus on one or the other. When we figure out that you are simply reading from the slides, then we’ll just read the slides.

Guess what? We can read faster than you can talk. So there’s no point in your being up there, right? Just email us your word-packed presentation (or what some call “slide-umentation”) and be off with you.

My personal goal? That you can’t understand my slide presentation without my presence (or at least, my voice). I use 1-2 words per slide, or an arresting image, and use those words and images to bolster what it is I’m talking about. And I get a lot more engagement out of the audience. I used the word WTF on a slide behind me as I talk about “what your target market shouldn’t be thinking when they encounter your marketing.” Even a bunch of software guys from another culture got what I was saying–the titters and laughter said it all.

Am I saying that I’m the next Tony Robbins. Hell no. But at the very least I can make a presentation enjoyable and dynamic and try to erase some of the collective pain being inflicted on business audiences every day.

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In the first part of this series, I talked about the importance of relevance to any newsletter effort. In the second part, I talked about building an editorial calendar to make the task of communicating your relevant message easier.

Now it’s time to talk about building trust and loyalty with each newsletter edition. One of my favorite business authors is Alan Weiss. He’s the “consultant to the consultants,” and has carved out a fantastic career for himself giving advice and writing books geared to the consultant market. His book, Million Dollar Consulting is a must-read for anyone wanting to get into the business.

After reading through 7 or 8 of his books, listening to him on tape, seeing him live, and so on, I’ve come away with a solid piece of advice that you have to follow in the consulting business–and by extension, any newsletter effort. Everything you do, every issue you publish, every article in every issue, must increase your visibility and your credibility at the same time.

Let me underscore this advice by way of a silly example. If you were to stand up right now at your place of business, and walk away from your desk as you start stripping off all your clothes, then run around your building and then proceed up main street to the downtown theater district, you would, by any estimation, increase your visibility.

In fact, you’d probably earn a spot on the evening news (depending on the size of the town and/or the local weird factor–here in Austin, you might not even warrant a second look!) or at least, a police report.

What about your credibility, though? Just because you did something as crazy as that, would you have earned any credibility points?

As crazy as all that sounds, most advertising is run on “act crazy and they will come” model. The promise inherent in any advertising buy goes something like this: you hand over 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 grand (or heaven help you, more) and we’ll run your ad in a newspaper/magazine/radio show/TV show/cable channel/web site for X days, with Y frequency, giving you adequate visibility.

The credibility is up to you, really, in that you need to buy the ad in the right places (to attract the right people) and the right times (no sense going after high-powered executives by buying up 2am radio spots), but at the very end of the day, only certain industries benefit from this approach. Just about anyone can see or hear an ad for 1/2 off books at insert-favorite-bookstore-name here, and if they’re book people (or know a book person) they’ll be enticed to buy. Same goes for food, clothing, gasoline, etc.

For the rest of us, in the B2B business, it just doesn’t work that way. You have to build credibility.

Why? Because building credibility leads to trust. Trust leads to conversations and consensus. Consensus leads to closed deals. Its the inside track. Let all your competitors slave away doing dog and pony shows with the same old tired PowerPoint presentations while you get busy doing the work. A newsletter story (or more likely, a steady stream of effective newsletter stories over time) can help get you there.

Let me walk you through it.

Let’s go back to our original example, the one featuring your small consulting firm taking on the extra-specialized or unusual work that the big boys can’t or won’t handle. I’ve been working this scenario, by the way, because this is the kind of situation I find a lot of my colleagues in. If they’re a small insurance company, then they’re the ones going the extra mile finding out how to insure a 5000 year old Ming vase–your big insurer wouldn’t even bother. If they’re a web developer, perhaps they specialize in creating MVC applications in CodeIgniter and that’s all they do. If they’re a copywriter, they specialize in medical or high-tech copywriting, and not so much with jingles for radio spots or what have you.

Regardless, the small consulting firm with a super-focused practice putting out a newsletter has to convince people that they have the right expertise and the right attitude to get the job done. You can’t just put out stories in your newsletter that say, “We’re really good and you should hire us.” Instead, that’s what the subtext of each of your stories should be. However, you have to finesse it.

So. If you put out a newsletter with 2-3 stories in it, each story should build on the others. The first story may be focused on the 10 things you should do in the event of X. The second story should feature a case study in which you helped a company with X. And the third story should be all the Y things you should do after X is completed.

If topic X isn’t big enough for this treatment, then make sure that topics X and Y (or X, Y, and Z depending on the size of each newsletter edition) relate to each other in some meaningful way. For example, X and Y might go together like marketing and sales (or operations and finance, or copywriting and copyediting), or they may be diametrically opposed, such as saving money on operations and spending more money on sales promotions. Doesn’t matter, because you have to tie things together, even if the tie-in is “these things are opposites.”

Furthermore, everything about the story must resonate with high credibility. You can’t have a boring or obscure or clever headline. Instead, it should say something like “How to Avoid Problems with X” or “The 10 Different Ways to Achieve Y.”

The tone of your stories needs to be conversational and friendly, and provide insight and advice, not a hard sell or just a list of fluffy adjectives that describes how good your service or product is. In fact, if you come right out and say BUY NOW at any time, it’s a sure sign you need to do a rewrite.

Instead, you need to tell folks, at the end of each piece, how to get a hold of you (whether that be email, phone, fax, or in person). If you don’t do it at the end of each piece, then put in a call to action in every newsletter. And if you don’t do specific calls to action (”To learn more about how we can help you save money on Z”) then provide a general call to action.

Ultimately, if you don’t ask, then that impacts your credibility, too. So it’s a fine line between being too coy and too pushy. Just state your case in a credible way, then tell folks how to get a hold of you if they need help with the same issue.

Over time, as you work through your editorial calendar, making sure that you keep hitting all the relevant points of your messaging, your going to target different parts of your audience. Over time, you’ll build up a library of articles.

That’s enough for now. In the next part of this series, we’ll talk a bit about mixing up the media you use–it doesn’t always have to be articles or downloadable PDFs.

Why? Because each edition must instill trust–they have to trust not only the content, but that you’re in your right mind at all times. If something isn’t obvious, point it out. If it is obvious, say that it’s obvious and move on without belaboring the point.

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